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Saturday, June 20, 2015

#92: Dark Souls: The Use of Estus

From Software is
very skilled at what they do. Coming off of my Demon's Souls
playthrough not too long ago, I continued on into its spiritual
sequel: Dark Souls. While Demon's Souls allowed players to gather and
grind for healing items, Dark Souls uses a new system to manage
health. The first NPC that players interact with will give them an
item called the Estus Flask. This flask has a finite number of
charges, and consuming one of these charges heals the player. When
resting at a bonfire, a safe haven where players can recover their
health and manage their inventory, this flask will be recharged.

What I found was
that this one change had a profound effect on the game's design. The
most obvious of these changes is that the ability to mend wounds
becomes limited. In Demon's Souls, there were several varieties of
healing grass, and players could hold up to 99 tufts of each type.
Personally, I recall constantly have at least 40 or 50 tufts of
whatever grasses I was able to obtain at any given point during my
playthrough. Towards the end, I had so much that I couldn’t pick up
any more. In fact, grass was so plentiful that I had 99 tufts both on
my person, and in the excess-item stash.This is definitely not the
case in Dark Souls. Resting at a bonfire will only fill the Estus
Flask up to 5 charges. It is possible to upgrade bonfires so that
this limit is raised up to a maximum of 20. Doing so requires the use
of “Humanity”, an uncommon resource that, like souls, is lost on
death. The act of “kindling” a bonfire is rare for this reason.
During my playthrough, I only upgraded most bonfires enough to hold
10 charges in the Estus Flask.

The difference in
these limits strongly manifested itself in my playstyle. If a fight
left me with even a small scratch during my adventures in Demon's
Souls, I would immediately consume a tuft of healing grass (or
several, depending on how wounded I was) before moving on. With 99
tufts in my back pocket, there was nothing stopping me from making
use of one or two.

In Dark Souls, this
same decision became a much more tactical choice. When I finished a
battle with only minor damage, it would be smarter to keep going
without using the Estus Flask to heal, because that healing will be
more useful later on. Once I figured out where a stage's boss was and
how to get to them, it was imperative to take as little damage as I
could so I could save Estus Flask charges for the boss fight, where I
would need them the most. Even without the looming threat of an
impending boss, running out of healing while exploring a stage was a
big enough threat that there is always a natural reluctance to avoid
using it when I didn’t have to.

If a single run of
a level in Dark Souls was going badly enough, me being badly injured
surprisingly early on and heavily imbibing of the Estus Flask, a
choice needed to be made. I would often seriously consider whether it
was wise to keep going, or to just return to the bonfire and try
again. While bonfires do recharge the Estus Flask and mend any
lingering wounds, resting at them also respawns every single enemy at
full strength. In other words, trekking back to the bonfire and
restoring my lost Estus is also resigning myself to starting an area
over again almost from scratch. Through the Estus Flask, Dark Souls
moved away from the war of attrition that Demon's Souls sometimes
wandered into. Instead, every area is a test of not just character
build and player skill, but also of the ability to manage resources.

The Estus Flask
also lessened Dark Souls’s need for grinding, especially in
comparison to its predecessor. Despite having large quantities of
healing grass in the original Demon's Souls, repeated attempts to
clear areas and fight bosses could and would deplete reserves. This
meant that it would eventually be necessary to revisit old areas and
grind for additional grass to replenish the player's supplies. In the
early game, I frequently found myself returning to the Boletarian
Palace in between boss attempts, once my grass count had fallen below
20, to gather more. Consequently, this meant that the time between
boss attempts would sometimes be a little too long.

The Estus Flask
fixes this problem. Since one can no longer grind for restoratives,
there exists no incentive nor need to do so. For this reason, the
downtime between boss encounters is reduced only to the time it takes
for one to get from the nearest bonfire to the boss chamber. Even
though my overall playthrough of Dark Souls was longer than that of
my Demon's Souls playthrough, this reduced time between boss attempts
gave the illusion of an accelerated pace. I could fight a boss as
many times as necessary to defeat it without having to stop and grind
for healing items, which is a boon in the Souls franchise.

Including the Estus
Flask could be seen as a minor, seemingly meaningless addition. In
truth, it is one of the biggest, most vital changes that came with
the transition from Demon’s Souls to Dark Souls. This one change
transformed the dungeoneering from a gradual and methodical war of
attrition between the enemy forces and the player’s healing
reserves to a test of how well they can management resources. When it
comes time to brave the stronger enemies and boss encounters, it also
accelerates the pace of repeated attempts. This kind of attention to
detail is why people love the Souls games more than anything else.
Each new design decision is carefully considered before it is
implemented and the final product is all the strong for it.